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At 32, Julie Tristant, the French-born actress has made her way to Canada, and managed to build a strong resume there and in the states. She has been in a myriad of plays (No Way! No Way! 2018), indies (Kai Kazi 2017) and short films (Nice Guy 2018) that allows her to perfect her acting skills.

“I have always loved meaningful movies,” she admits. This love for meaningful movies allows Julie to be conscious in the roles she selects to perform. “I like movies that have a positive message or movies that questions things in society. I have found myself fond of movies with homosexual content that questions the traditional ideas of love, family, friendship. I loved The Dictator with Charlie Chaplin, where he gave that fantastic speech, accused Hitler of being the most dangerous man on Earth … wow … there is a high degree of courage that goes into writing and acting in films like that. Truth. It’s watching those kinds of films that you come to understand more people.”

Courage & truth are the most important traits Tristant would like to have audiences absorb from her performances. Why? It is because connection to the character is extremely important to her. It is that personal touch that she confesses that prevents her from playing run-of-the-mill roles. “I mean every role can be great. It all depends on how one acts within that role, but the typical crying and scared girl in horror movies or the girl waiting to be saved in action films does not particularly appeal to me as a viewer. As an actress I know I could act in one of those roles and know the reason why the girl is waiting to be rescued because as an actress I would be inside the feelings of the character. Still I’d prefer to be that actress giving a voice to characters that have important messages to bring.”

Attending her first acting class at age 7, Julie remembers enjoying them – meeting the other children there and all the acting exercises assigned to explore imagination, movement and character. This prompted her to attend more of them for several years afterwards. As she moved into her teenage years, she recalls falling in love with the lives of actors. “Even as an adult I was always thinking about acting. After graduating from college, I went to work. But soon I found the desire to act so overwhelming that i took a night class for it. One evening i performed a monologue and felt so content and relieved that i felt that this was something i really wanted to do.”

All of the two years Julie spent training in Paris before making her move to Montreal is paying off. It is this training, the professional exploration with short films and plays that has strengthened her passion to act. “With all the training I learned to understand what acting truly is: like how to play a character when you are a young actor versus when you become a more seasoned actor; learning not to be intimidated by roles and being natural inside the character – not to act ‘as if’ were the character. Essentially, that all represents a lot of elements and challenges. So thanks to those tools I know what to do and that makes me more confident and more passionate.”